Fri Feb 24 2012 11:17Beautiful Soup 4 Beta 8:
I didn't even mention beta 7 on NYCB because it was oriented towards getting rid of test failures. Test failures that had a lot to do with what versions of what parsers were installed, but nothing to do with whether or not Beautiful Soup itself was broken.

Beta 8 adds very basic namespace awareness. By "basic" I mean:

Handle documents that include namespaced tags and attributes without crashing or mangling the document on output.

If the parser provides namespace information for a tag or attribute, store it for the user's reference instead of discarding it.

That's it. No one responded to my request for namespace-related feature requests, so I'm doing the bare minimum.